Zimbabwe attends CRASA, regional roaming fees to go

By Staff reporter | 03 Apr 2019 at 11:27hrs
CRASA
Zimbabwe recently attended the Communications Regulators' Association of Southern Africa (CRASA) with other regional regulators as they set standards and policies for the region, in a five day an event that also saw the annual general meeting being held in Tanzania's capital city.

For the past few years, the regional body has been driving the scrapping of roaming fees within the Southern Africa region, a matter which has captured our headlines, just but too many times now, hopefully, they will now expedite it.

CRASA is a body responsible for regulating ICT for SADC countries and for steering ICT and postal sector development in Southern Countries, through policy interventions.

Top amongst the issues discussed during the CRASA meeting was the issue of enabling smart cities for SADC, a leap which most Southern African countries are already implementing, while more importantly, applying super-fast speeds of 5G technology to enable the communication transmissions in congested cities.

In this year's CRASA AGM, Zimbabwe through Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz), was represented by the Director General Dr Gift Machengete.

POTRAZ director, on his arrival, expressed optimism that attending CRASA is of national significance because of the harmonization of standards, ICT and policy standards and procedures

"CRASA is very important to us as a regional partner, it is responsible for harmonization of ICT and Postal Policy standards together with regional procedures and it is also responsible for steering ICT and Postal sector development through research harmonization of ICT, " said Dr Machengete.

Dr Machengete said that the issue of roaming cost was at center stage as regulators are in agreement to completely do away with the roaming costs as the regions will now accept national to call as if they are just home.

Dr Machengete also added that Participating of Zimbabwe in CRASA will help the country to advance the technological sector and drive e-commerce especially in the SADC postal sector where they are current reform initiatives to help the sector leverage on e-commerce and innovation.

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